The New Orleans Pelicans didn’t just lose Monday night. They got buried.
Golden State turned Chase Center into a runaway by halftime, and the final line - Warriors 138, Pelicans 87 - will live in the franchise record book. It was the worst regular season defeat in Pelicans history, a 51-point hammering that left no room for spin.
“We got our a- kicked,” said Pelicans’ head coach Jamahl Mosley. “No other way to put it. They came in and punched us in the mouth and we didn’t respond the right way.”
That margin erased the old regular-season mark of 49 points, set in a 153-104 loss to the Miami Heat in April 2025. The only uglier result in franchise history came in the playoffs in 2009, when the then-New Orleans Hornets were beaten by the Denver Nuggets 121-63.
The Pelicans were already short-handed before the opening tip and never had the firepower to keep pace. Zion Williamson sat out for the first time this season, resting on the second night of a back-to-back after playing in Sunday’s 139-123 loss to the Los Angeles Clippers. Trey Murphy was out with bilateral patellar tendinopathy, and Trendon Watford missed the game with a right ankle sprain.
Before the game, Mosley pointed to the “next man up mentality” and said, “We have guys who have started before, that have been in the lineup and out of the lineup. So we’re going to have guys that are ready to go.”
They weren’t.
New Orleans fell behind 72-43 by halftime after connecting on just 3 of 17 shots from beyond the arc. Golden State, by contrast, was rolling from deep, hitting 12 of 23 3-pointers in the first two quarters and finishing 21 of 44 for the night, a blistering 55%.
Derik Queen led the Pelicans with 16 points, scoring 10 of them in the first half. Steph Curry and Brandin Podziemski paced the Warriors with 25 points each, and Golden State stretched its winning streak to eight games after opening the season 0-3.
Mosley said the back-to-back blowouts have to mean something.
“That’s two nights in a row we allowed our offense to dictate our defense,” Mosley said. “139 last night. 138 tonight. To understand how we want to play, sometimes you’ve got to get hit in the dang mouth.
And we got hit in the mouth twice. How we will respond is going to say a lot about us.
And that’s all of us.”
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What usually separates New Orleans from nights like this is the support around its top options, and that part never showed up against Los Angeles. The Pelicans were loose with the ball, struggled to string together clean possessions, and never found the kind of balance that can turn a good offensive performance into a win, which makes the next stop against the Warriors feel like an early test of how quickly they can clean things up. [Read more 🡒]